Special issue on food sovereignty in Globalizations journal

The editors and contributors of the special issue argue that to advance the theory and practice of food sovereignty, new frameworks and analytical methods are needed to move beyond binaries— between urban and rural, gender equality and the family farm, trade and localism, and autonomy and engagement with the state.

A research agenda in food sovereignty must not shy away from the rising contradictions in and challenges to the movement. The places of seeming contradiction may in fact be where the greatest insights are to be found.

They suggest that by taking a relational perspective, scholars can begin to draw insight into the challenges and sticking points of food sovereignty by training their lens on shifts in the global food regime, on the efforts to construct sovereignty at multiple scales, and on the points of translation where food sovereignty is articulated through historical memory, identity, and everyday life.

This special issue is one of the collections that came out of the international conferences on food sovereignty: in September 2013 in Yale University and in ISS in January 2014.